Monday, September 5, 2016

This is part of a series about young Kylie Jean, who is a fellow Texan as well as a confident and self-possessed young woman who discovers an interest in Gymnastics while watching the Olympics. She takes a class and meets a new friend - one who is deaf, so she also learns sign language.

It was a fun romp with nicely-done illustrations supporting the chapter book style, by the oddly-named Tuesday Mourning, which sounds like a book title by Jasper Fforde, but is actually a real person. It was nice to see exercise as part of the story as well as bringing in someone who clearly wasn't handicapped despite being deaf. If I have two complaints it is that first of all, Kylie's father was conspicuous by his absence. He's mentioned here and there, but he never really seems to be around.

The other issue is that there were no people of color visible which was not a pleasant thing to experience. Texas is populated by a diversity of peoples including American Indians, Indian Indians, and people of Chinese, Vietnamese, Hispanic, and African ethnicity, yet apart from one illustration which featured an African American family as background decoration, this was an all-Caucasian occasion again.

Despite that I'm prepared to recommend this as a worthy read because it has so much else going for it, and this is a positive review in the dire hope that if the author doesn't embrace diversity next time out, maybe the artist will do so on her behalf? I can't imagine she was explicitly instructed to draw only white folk, yet this is pretty much what she did!